The law prohibits and penalizes discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, or social status, but discrimination continued against women and girls, Afro-Brazilians, indigenous persons, and LGBT persons.

Federal law does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, but several states and municipalities have administrative... Expand

The law prohibits and penalizes discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, or social status, but discrimination continued against women and girls, Afro-Brazilians, indigenous persons, and LGBT persons.

Federal law does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, but several states and municipalities have administrative regulations that prohibit such discrimination and provide for equal access to government services. Social discrimination remained a problem, especially against the transgender population. Violence against LGBT individuals remained a serious concern.

In 2013 the SDH released its Second Annual Report on Homophobic Violence, which stated that in 2012 there were 315 LGBT-related homicides, compared with 278 in 2011. The NGO Rainbow Group considered the SDH report more accurate than information in other annual reports on homophobic violence because of its use of government data as well as media reports.

According to the SDH, many transgender individuals had difficulty entering the formal labor market or study programs due to an apparent discrepancy between the photograph and name on an individual’s labor card and an individual’s personal appearance and “social name,” which prevented some from obtaining permission to work.

Within Sao Paulo City there are two centers dedicated to supporting “victims of homophobia” that provide social support and inform victims of their rights under the law. A third center was under construction. The city government also has a program that allocates paid internships for transgender students in City Hall to improve their future career prospects and involvement in public service.

The National LGBT Council, created in 2010 to combat discrimination and promote the rights of LGBT persons, continued to meet every two months. Meetings were open to the public and broadcast over the internet.

In April Rio de Janeiro’s state-run program “Rio without Homophobia” provided 430 civil police officers with training on the rights of LGBT persons.

On May 17, the Recife NGO Instituto PAPAI launched a nation-wide campaign to support LGBT youth. PAPAI organized a video contest among public high school students to increase participation in the campaign. The videos were to be posted on the website and the winner announced in November.

In June in the city of Sao Paulo, 56 private companies participated in the Forum of Companies and LGBT Rights, an organization created to discuss the best practices to reduce discrimination and promote LGBT rights in working places.

Waldir Pires Bittencourt, an openly LGBT candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in Amapa State, was attacked by assailants who shouted homophobic slurs during the attack. The victim stated that in the weeks prior to the attack he faced a number of death threats through social media and by telephone.

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Brazilian photographer Nayara Leite has been exploring the lives of six Brazilian homosexuals who were expelled from their homes when they told their families they were gay. Leite asked them to send her a happy photograph of them as a child, which she then burnt - an act she feels reflects the rejection they had experienced. One of them was unable to provide a picture, as everything was destroyed by her family.

Despite serving more than 25 years in Congress, Bolsonaro appears eager to present himself as a political outsider — a no-nonsense figure defiantly challenging the status quo. Or, as he puts it to NPR, as a "little ugly duckling." "We don't have a big team. We have a very small party," says Bolsonaro. "A big part of the media doesn't treat us properly, and even then — without Lula — we are leading the national polls." Until recently, Bolsonaro was on the margins of Brazilian politics, a seven-term congressman who occasionally featured in the headlines, mostly for making offensive remarks about the LGBTQ community, women and Afro-Brazilians.

Erica and Jorge have been together for 16 years and tied the knot on Sunday in the Brazilian municipality of Franco da Rocha, near São Paulo. But theirs was no conventional wedding. Jorge was described on Buzzfeed Brasil as a cisgender man, while Erica uses female pronouns and is identified as a “travesti,” a gender expression that is common to cultures in South America that denotes a person “who has subverted the gender norms forced upon them before birth,” and “doesn’t accept existing strictly in the two single categories of male or female” as Brazilian LGBT+ activist Sofia Favero explained to NBC News. The couples worked as scavengers, collecting as many as 400 kilos of recyclable materials every day in their cart, and was well-known locally.

THE SON OF Jair Bolsonaro – the proto-fascist Congressmanleading Brazil’s 2018 presidential polls if Lula (as expected) is barred from running – used Twitter on Friday night to post a fabricated poster in order to claim that LGBT groups are now explicitly advocating pedophilia. The poster he hyped is a long-time internet fake that has been repeatedly exposed as false by fact-checking sites, designed explicitly to incite hatred for LGBTs by linking them to advocacy of pedophilia. In less than 24 hours, Bolsonaro’s fake posting, to his close to 300,000 followers, has been repeatedly re-tweeted and liked. Not only has Bolsonaro refused to delete the tweets, but he has posted several subsequent tweets in an attempt to affirm his claim that gay men in particular are advocates of pedophilia and pedophiles.

Six activists made Moscow a little gayer using some creativity. The activists from Spain, The Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia joined together using soccer shirts, standing side-by-side in the color of the pride flag to protest Russia’s “homosexual propaganda” ban. “Unfortunately, 40 years later, there are still countries in which homosexuality is persecuted, sometimes even by jail sentences, and in which the rainbow flag is forbidden. Russia is one of these countries,” the activists said through their“The Hidden Flag”project page.

Countries which have taken more steps towards LGBT equality have overwhelmingly done better at the 2018 World Cup than their intolerant counterparts. Every nation where homosexuality is illegal has been knocked out of the tournament in Russia, along with the great majority of countries which don’t yet have equal marriage. It seems that many countries could have done with trying to increase their chances of triumphing inour LGBT guide to who should win the World Cup. Being gay is illegal in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Nigeria, Tunisia and Senegal – all teams which fell at the first hurdle, bombing out at the group stage.

Thousands of members of the LGBT community marched to celebrate International LGBT Pride Day Saturday with participants in several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean taking to the streets to demand respect for their rights. In Peru, thousands marched in the capital city of Lima marking the day of pride demanding their rights be respected. In El Salvador, the marchers flooded the main streets with the colors of the rainbow, music, and slogans, joining other commemorative events on the day around the region. According to EFE, nearly 6,000 persons from San Miguel, Santa Ana, and the capital took to the streets to mark the day. In Mexico, the LGBT members demanded more representation and called on the country's next president to respect their rights, on the eve of the general elections.

In Brazil, 958 LGBT people were killed in the past three years —half of them last year. A Brazilian Prison is opening next Tuesday a “diversity aisle” in order to limit verbal and physical abuses that usually face prisoners with sexual preferences and gender identities that differ from the socially constructed norm of heterosexuality. “Besides preserving the physical integrity of LGBT people, the diversity aisle demonstrates respect to the specificity of every single person and will offer more dignity to people imprisoned who would wish this kind of environment,” said Andre Santos da Silva, who led the project for the prison.

Just a month before the world celebrates Gay Pride Week, Chile passed a law that allows transgender citizens to change their name and sex on state registries without needing a sex-change operation. At the same time, Ecuador recognize a lesbian couple's legal right to adopt a child. These and other monumental LGBTQI+ legal precedents in Latin America over the past decade are recalling the queer and transgender revolutionaries who began the movement more than 50 years ago.

Stories

“My dream is to get married and be able to guarantee my partner the right to stay on the small piece of land I have.” When Valeria Rodriguez heard this...

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Organizations

The following organization(s) conducts its own work in this country to improve the lives of LGBTI people there and/or funds local organizations doing that work. Please click on the link to learn more about them and support their work.